Author: Tridea Partners

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 you now have options to deploy the applications for your business. Based on your needs you can now deploy D365 for Operations via the cloud, a hybrid instance (cloud and edge) or on-premise (local business data).

In this blog, we will take a closer look at each of these options enabling you to decide which deployment option is right for your organization:

Cloud

D365 for Operations has been available for nearly a year as a full Cloud offering and Microsoft is seeing an unprecedented global adoption of cloud business. There is no doubt that the future of business processes lies in the cloud and that Microsoft can provide customers with the best value with our cloud services.

Cloud and Edge

Businesses require uninterrupted execution of some of their mission critical business processes i.e. a manufacturing facility where workers need to keep the production line humming and avoid production delays, especially in lean manufacturing scenarios. Also, some geographies require that transactions and personal information be captured and stored locally.

Microsoft recently announced the plans for a hybrid cloud deployment meant to accommodate these specific scenarios, so that organizations can combine the best of both worlds – cloud and local. Dynamics 365 for Operations plans to enable organizations to run their business processes from application servers at the edges, meaning that transactions are supported by local application services and business data is stored locally.

The Microsoft cloud connection ensures data aggregation, financial reporting, intelligence, and more. The cloud instance also provides the local installation with data failover in the Microsoft cloud, automated deployment and continuous updates, and elastic compute capacity to infuse “intelligence” into the business process when needed.

This deployment option, “cloud and edge”, is a true differentiated option that combines the power of cloud and on-premises in a unique way to offer scale, continuity, and intelligence.

Local business Data

Meanwhile, some organizations simply are not ready to store their company’s mission critical data in the cloud. This requirement, in many cases, is due to industry regulations, country or geographic cloud adoption, recent data center investments, or an organization’s enterprise standards. For these customers, Microsoft has announced a new deployment option that will not require their business data to be stored in the cloud. This deployment option, “local business data,” will support running your business processes on-premises, supporting local transactions and storage of local business data, without replication of your business data to the Microsoft cloud. In these cases, the typical replication of business data in the Microsoft cloud (referenced in the cloud and edge scenario) is simply switched off. With this option, customers now have choice – an option to turn ON or turn OFF cloud synchronization of their business data. If customers turn OFF cloud synchronization, no business data leaves their trustee’s boundaries. Also, functions like, embedded Power BI, Aggregated Views and Azure Machine Learning services based efficiencies are not available when Cloud Data synchronization is turned OFF. Customers can choose to take advantage of the embedded intelligence functions by simply turning ON data synchronization to the cloud.

For the “local business data” deployment scenario, the application servers and SQL database will run in a customer’s (or its partner’s) data center.

Choosing the right deployment option

You should select the deployment scenario that makes sense now but also have the flexibility to change later. You can move in either direction depending on your business needs. For example, you might start with a local data center and move to the cloud when it’s time for your hardware refresh.

From both a technology and licensing perspective, Microsoft strives to provide choice and flexibility:

New and existing customers will have paths forward to license both local business data and cloud and edge deployments. Existing investments will continue to be accounted for in our licensing.

Customers can license local business data deployments via a Dynamics 365 for Operations license with Software Assurance/Enhancement Plan or a subscription model.

One of most widely used features in Microsoft Dynamics AX, is the ability to perform powerful searches on any of the AX grid pages. What many don’t realize is you can save these searches or filters as part of your favorites. This functionality is also available in Dynamics 365 for Operations as part of the workspaces. This article will show you how to add these filters as favorites in Dynamics AX 2009 or Dynamics AX 2012.

First, configure an advanced filter, in one of the grid screens. In this example, all sales order grid was used.

In this example, we’ll create a filter to show us all unconfirmed sales orders, created in the last 100 days.

Once you put in the filter criteria, click on the modify and “Save As” and save your query.

Now you can use this query as the default for a menu item you add to your favorites. To do this, right click on the “All Sales Orders” menu option on the left hand navigation, and click “Add to favorites..”

Give your favorite a name “Sales Orders Unconfirmed last 100 Days” and select the query you want to save with the favorite.

Now, when you click on the favorite, it will open already filtered based on your query.

This post was written by Jason Federspiel, AX Functional Consultant at Tridea Partners. Tridea is a leading Microsoft Dynamics provider.

In our new guide we’ll share the 4 reasons why life sciences and the cloud belong together!

In a life science business, there is no lack of data related to product development, clinical trials, production (in-house and contract manufacturing), quality assurance, costing, the supply chain and other areas of the operation. How do you make sense of it without investing in compliance, data processing and analytical technologies?

In the cloud, life science companies can take advantage of the most powerful analytical tools available today. The cloud also supports your growth with cost controls or profit erosion. As leading life science companies are undergoing transformation into digital business and other are preparing for transformation initiatives to become compliant, more relevant and more competitive, the cloud is the single most important enabling element.

Microsoft Dynamics AX offers a nice set of tools for quickly performing a “what if” analysis on the impact of price changes (labor costs, material costs, or both) on the standard cost of manufactured items with multi-level bills of materials.

A high-level summary of the process is as follows:

Setup a Cost Version of type = Planning that has a Fallback Principle = Active costs

This allows us to define “what-if” costs where applicable, while referring back to the current standards wherever a “what-if” cost is not entered.

This allows us to run the what-if analysis while only having to key into the system the incremental changes

Make the proposed changes to the labor rates and/or raw material costs at any level in the product structure/BOM, assigning the changes to the new “What-If” costing version.

Update the price in the Cost Category form to perform what-if analysis based on labor rate changes

Update the cost price of an item on any level of the BOM/Formula to perform what-if analysis based on material purchase price changes

Run a Cost Calculation for the “What-If” costing version on the top-level FG item.

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